Is Police Misconduct Contagious? Non-trivial Null Findings from Dallas, Texas

ConclusionsOur observational findings —based on data from one large police department in the United States—ultimately suggest that actor-based and ecological explanations of police deviance should not be summarily dismissed in favor of accounts emphasizing negative socialization, where our study design also raises the possibility th at results are partly driven by unobserved trait-based variation in the situations that officers find themselves in. All in all, interventions focused on individual officers, including the termination of deviant police, may be fruitful for curtailing police misconduct—where early interventions foc used on new offenders may be key to avoiding the escalation of deviance.

Source: Journal of Quantitative Criminology - January 12, 2022 Category: Criminology Source Type: research